Self employed

400ixl

If you are self employed and your profit is £6k then you should not be paying tax and your class 2 NIC should now be covered for you as part of the changes in a previous budget.

As above, is this your only income? How have you calculated your profit?

sheramber

Presumably your tools are a one off expense to start your self employment. 

How much is your daily rate?

 How many hours do you work in a day?

How much tax and NIC have you paid?

Flatfacedcat

Greenwellies_2 said:

How do self employed people manage? 
What am I doing wrong? 

@Greenwellies_2:

Until CoViD hit, I have worked as self-employed for about 9 years. In an industry different than yours - as far as I understood from your thread - however there are some aspects which are always valid to most of the self-employed workers and these are mostly related to the price one charges for the work that performs - I will write based on my accumulated experience.
First of all lets clarify some details which make a difference between being self employed and being an employee.
(1st) Self employed people are contractors who offer a service in change of an agreed amount of money.
(2nd) As contractor offering a service, a self-employed person is working with a company, not for a company. Pay attention to the difference: with someone, and not for someone. This sets a difference in how the company that the contractor is working with should treat her/him, which is as another company and not as an employee.
(3rd) As service provider, the contractor is the one who decides how to perform the job was hired for and sets the desired amount of money to receive.

About the money:

* the price one charges is what pretty much determines the possibility to cover all the costs or not
* such price is specific to the industry, so each contractor should be aware what other contractors performing the same job are charging and should adjust its price to the market values in order to be competitive
* being competitive is not synonym with "cheap" - in fact, charging a low price does two bad things: first it doesn't allow to earn enough, and second it destroys the market price for everybody sabotaging it
* some project managers have the wrong thought according to which if their company provides regular work to a contractor then in their opinion is fair to agree for a lower price. This thought is wrong and no contractor should accept charging a lower price in exchange of regular projects. Why? Does your stomach make you a discount from time to time? No it doesn't: your stomach always wants the same amount of food from you to eat. Same you as contractor should do: charge the same price, without discounts.

With the premises above-mentioned, the answer to your questions is quite obvious: the person who works as self-employed must be always aware of how the market is going and keep its price in a way that always does two things: first allows the person to pay all its expenses to live, and second conveys a good balance between experience and cost of the service offered.

When CoViD hit, the industry in which I worked suffered a downtrend in projects available and as this situation didn't allow me anymore to earn enough I had to stop being self-employed and since then I worked as common employee in a few companies.

sheramber

If you are self employed you set your charge for your services.

If the company you do the work for set how much they pay you then are you really self employed?

Can you work your own hours?

Can you go on holiday when you want?

https://www.gov.uk/employment-status/selfemployed-contractor

Savvy_Sue

Greenwellies_2 said:

Simply,  my "boss's" business model is to have self employed staff and that's how I am at this point.  
I tried to negotiate an increase and I was told the accountant said they couldn't afford it. 

Course that's an excellent model: no employer's National Insurance to pay, no pension scheme or contributions, no sick pay, no holiday pay, no statutory parental leave, no expenses for running a payroll ... What's not to like from his point of view?

Do follow the link to HMRC's status page.

Look around and see if you could sell your services elsewhere, for a higher hourly rate. 

DullGreyGuy

sheramber said:

If you are self employed you set your charge for your services.

If your employed or self employed its ultimately a negotiation

Marcon

DullGreyGuy said:

sheramber said:

If you are self employed you set your charge for your services.

If your employed or self employed its ultimately a negotiation

Quite. You can set your charge at whatever level you wish, but if there aren't any takers...

FlorayG

I begin to suspect that you are not legally 'self employed' and your 'client' is just shirking the law, but without more detail it's not possible to say; although if you are not allowed to say "I'm on holiday next week so I can't work" without permission from them, then you are NOT self-employed.
Consider the accountant saying 'we can't afford to pay more'. This means they have a very poor business model if the services you provide are essential. They are undercharging their clients and that's not your problem, what they pay YOU is your problem. Could they continue to trade without you? I think they are exploiting you. Just because you love the job you do isn't a reason to leave yourself short of the essentials of life. If you said "My rates are going up, this is what I will cost you from now on", would they be able to easily let you go and replace you? Remember you don't have to give notice. I think you have the upper hand

FlorayG

Greenwellies_2 said:

I love my job, I don't want to go back to my old work. But what I do has to be done in a particular environment;  they have the premises; I can't just set up and go it alone. I feel that this is an offset for my low daily rate, (that I don't get charged for using the premises.

OK we don't know what you do so lets assume you make specialist widgets. How much would a company charge you to hire similar premises daily/weekly? Do you get 'free' use of it to make widgets for other clients or do you only get to use it to make this client's widgets? If you can only use it while making their own widgets then you'e not really getting free use of it.
If you didn't have these premises you couldn't do your job; but if they didn't have you working there then the premises would be useless to the client

DullGreyGuy

Marcon said:

DullGreyGuy said:

sheramber said:

If you are self employed you set your charge for your services.

If your employed or self employed its ultimately a negotiation

Quite. You can set your charge at whatever level you wish, but if there aren't any takers...

Likewise a potential employee can state their salary expectations are £150k but if the going rate is £15/hr then there won't be any takers. 

FlorayG said:

Consider the accountant saying 'we can't afford to pay more'. This means they have a very poor business model if the services you provide are essential. 

Other than we have no idea if the accountant has ever said that, or even been consulted on the matter. Its easy to blame an unseen expert for a decision than to look someone in the face and say that you think they're a mug and will do a job for a fraction of the price it should be and so Xmas dividends are looking particularly good.